It actually raises a fairly serious question. Are we going to one day see armed conflict over the moon and other areas in Space? History has shown that isolated areas, even if protected from being claimed by international law and treaty (see the recent controversy involving Russia and the North Pole), leading me to question the effectiveness of things like the Outer Space Treaty and Moon Treaty.

As far as I know, none of the treaties cover corporations or individuals. So whats to stop some insane rich person from getting together a bunch of people, getting up there (down the road when it's more cost-effective, of course) and declaring himself emperor of the moon? If my understanding of the laws on these type of things is accurate (and it could very well be wrong), then absoloutely nothing. We could be looking at Richard Branson: Moon Emperor in a few more decades, and for some reason that scares the piss out of me...

I'd heard somewhere that the idea of the land rush in regards to the moon was what was actually stirring NASA up to make a push for it; we don't want other countries to get there first and take the good territory.

The CN space station seems like so much vaporware, though they might convert a couple of mostly empty Shenzhou capsule into a Salyut-grade space station. I don't think their latest rocket could loft something like MIR.

Moon Treaty. Man. I remember Jerry Pournelle and the L-5 crowd moaning that if President Carter signed the treaty then the Communists have won.

It's true that ISS is no great shakes, but it has the virtue of being up there. If Puti^H^H^H^HMedvedev and his successors can keep Russia stable, then their space program won't be taken over by gangsters like it was in Yeltsin's day. The best way to go would be an international follow-on to the ISS, a heavy-duty staging platform for a more substantial join mission to the moon. That way, we have something to show for it.

As for potential James Bond villains, even the richest oligarch doesn't have the organization even to crash a rocket into the moon. Dr. Doom, maybe. I'd love to see a robot dropped on the moon to belt out the Latverian National Anthem.

"ALICE can be improved with the addition of oxidizers and become a potential solid rocket propellant on Earth," says Dr Steven F Son of Purdue university. "Theoretically, ALICE can be manufactured in distant places like the moon or Mars, instead of being transported to distant locations at high cost."

The jury's still out on whether there are useful amounts of water ice on the Moon, but there's known to be some on Mars. Being able to make rocket fuel on either body would be good news for prospective interplanetary expedition planners, as lugging fuel out from Earth for the return journey takes up a distressing amount of the outbound spacecraft's payload.

Idea - If I were suffering from a fatal disease then I would be more than happy to traipse off to Mars on a one way trip. And if I were to do this I'd assume that there would be more than myself willing to do this.

Perhaps this is the way ahead, or would that be too much of a 'downer' for NASA?

I've thought about it - I think the problem is you need several years training to be an astronaut and then a Mars mission would take a couple of years.

So you'd need someone who passed the really stringent physical and psychological tests who had an absolutely definite terminal disease AND had a high probability of surviving in good health for at least the next five years.

There's a relatively common fatal genetic disorder that only shows up in people past the age of 40 - Parkinson's? Muscular dystrophy? - so maybe you could send people under 30 who had the genes that cause it.

I agree with your thoughts about the training and testing. Perhaps a different way around it would be a 'dandelion seed' approach, loads of cheap launches with high failure rates, but you only need one to succeed.

I'm following Astro_Jeff on twitter, Astronaut Jeff Williams, as he prepares to launch on a Soyuz rocket to the space station and cannot get over how different their preperations are over there. And that is the direction the space program is going? Star City reminds me more of Ignition city.